Annual Q10 of soil respiration reflects plant phenological patterns as well as temperature sensitivity

By J. Curiel Yuste, Ivan A. Janssens, A. Carrara, Reinhart Ceulemans. 2004

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The temperature sensitivity of soil respiration (SR) is often estimated from the seasonal changes in the flux relative to those in soil temperature, and subsequently used in models to interpolate or predict soil fluxes. However, temperature sensitivities derived from seasonal changes in SR (from here on denoted seasonal Q10) may not solely reflect the temperature sensitivity of SR, because seasonal changes in SR can also be affected by other seasonally fluctuating conditions and processes. In this manuscript, we present a case study of how the seasonal Q10 of SR can be decoupled from the temperature sensitivity of SR. In a mixed temperate forest, we measured SR under vegetations with different leaf strategies: pure evergreen, pure deciduous, and mixed. Seasonal Q10 was much higher under deciduous than under evergreen canopies. However, at a shorter time scale, both vegetation types exhibited very similar Q10 values, indicating that the large differences in seasonal Q10 do not represent differences in the temperature sensitivity of the soil metabolism. The seasonal Q10 depends strongly on the amplitude of the seasonal changes in SR (SRs), which, under the particular climatic and edaphic conditions of our forest study site, were significantly larger in deciduous forest. In turn, SRs was positively correlated with the seasonal changes in leaf area index (LAIs), a measure of the deciduousness of the vegetation. Thus, in this temperate maritime forest, seasonal Q10 of SR was strongly influenced by the deciduousness of the vegetation. We conclude that the large differences in seasonal Q10 were not entirely due to different temperature sensitivities, but also to different seasonal patterns of plant activity in the evergreen and deciduous plants of this site. Some coniferous forests may be more seasonal than the one we studied, and the deciduous–evergreen differences observed here may not be broadly applicable, but this case study demonstrates that variation of plant phenological process can significantly contribute to the seasonality of SR, and, hence, calculated Q10 values. Where this occurs, the seasonal Q10 value for SR does not accurately represent temperature sensitivity. Because the strong seasonal correlation between SR and temperature does not necessarily imply a causal relationship, Q10 values derived form annual patterns of SR should be used with caution when predicting future responses of SR to climatic change.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9db3ba8079df69209b5359db0c15eb03a3b79094

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Citations in the corpus

On the variability of respiration in terrestrial ecosystems: moving beyond Q10 (2006, background): “The lower temperature sensitivities of soil respiration (Rey et al., 2002; Janssens & Pilegaard, 2003; Curiel Yuste et al., 2004) and total ecosystem respiration (Reichstein et al., 2002) observed during dry periods may largely be a result of substrate limitation caused by limited diffusion of…”
Response of mycorrhizal, rhizosphere and soil basal respiration to temperature and photosynthesis in a barley field (2007, background): “This effect, observed by Yuste et al. (2004) in a mixed temperate forest, is expected to be more pronounced in crop fields where plant biomass changes are proportionally greater than in other ecosystems.”
Rhizospheric and heterotrophic respiration of a warm-temperate oak chronosequence in China (2011, background): “…al., 2006; Tang et al., 2009), plant photosynthesis (Tang et al., 2005), leaf area and primary productivity (Högberg et al., 2001; Rey et al., 2002; Yuste et al., 2004), allocation patterns of recent photosynthates to roots (Högberg et al., 2001; Bhupinderpal-singh et al., 2003), and plant…”
Basal rates of soil respiration are correlated with photosynthesis in a mixed temperate forest (2007, background): “However, we did not correct for soil moisture effects in this particular analysis because: (1) only a few isolated drought events occurred during the study period (2001) and (2) drought effects were similar for all plots studied (Curiel Yuste et al., 2004).”
Root respiration in temperate mountain grasslands differing in land use (2006, background): “Such changes in root respiration have also been suggested to partly explain seasonal differences in Q10 of soil respiration in a forest (Curiel-Yuste et al., 2004).”
Whole ecosystem metabolic pulses following precipitation events (2008, background): “the exponential term in Eq. 1). E a A main critique of research examining biological temperature sensitivities has highlighted the dynamic temperature sensitivity of biologic systems (Luo et al . 2001; Clarke & Fraser 2004; Yuste et al . 2004; Davidson, Janssens & Luo 2006).”
Comparison of Fine Root Dynamics in Scots Pine and Pedunculate Oak in Sandy Soil (2005, background): “This is because in the oak plot, fine root productivity is only 40% of foliage productivity (Curiel Yuste et al., 2004), resulting in a substantial drop in the fine root–VAI ratio in the growing season.”
Soil respiration in perennial grass and shrub ecosystems: Linking environmental controls with plant and microbial sources on seasonal and diel timescales (2008, background): “These simple temperature and moisture relationships undoubtedly integrated and masked phenological controls on soil respiration rates [ Curiel-Yuste et al. , 2004].”